Tracker Beeper

Before I played the video and heard the sound it made, my first thought was that it would make a haunting clicking sound like a Geiger counter. Sure, it would be annoying, but I think it would be somewhat fitting.

Back in the days of yore there was this thing called &#x27;Peep, the Network Auralizer&#x27;. It made your server produce jungle sounds based on the type and amount of traffic passing through it. I had this installed on the server-under-the-stairs for a while but eventually got tired of living in the ever more crowded Amazon (the rainforest, the book store did not exist back then) and disabled it. There is a Usenix paper on this thing [1] which links to the original distribution site which - alas - no longer exists. It was mostly written in Perl and as such quite hackable so those who want to go a step beyond having your terminal bell bleep may want to hunt for an extant copy of Peep.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;legacy&#x2F;publications&#x2F;library&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;lisa2000&#x2F;full_papers&#x2F;gilfix&#x2F;gilfix_html&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usenix.org&#x2F;legacy&#x2F;publications&#x2F;library&#x2F;proceedin...</a>

I can only imagine the scenario...<p>lay person: See? Even though i turn the volume up on my speaker, there&#x27;s no noise during our zoom&#x2F;Teams call, etc.<p>tech support: oh, i see the problem...you&#x27;ve somehow disabled your audio. why would you do that, i&#x27;m curious?<p>lay person: oh, right i had forgotten that i did that...well, i started using some tool to audibly inform me whenever my data was being sent to google...so it go so annoying - constantly dinging all the bloody time, like incessentaly! - that i just disabled the audio, and its been peaceful ever since...but i see now, that my approach isn&#x27;t ideal...maybe i should uninstall that tracker beeper thingy?<p>tech support: slaps their palm to their face, multiple times...<p>This of course should not take away from the awesome value that this toool - for those of us who really care about privacy - would bring! Kudos to the author (and ignore my jokey scenario)!!!!

This is amazing! We all know, here, how much of a problem this is, but this idea seems to solve the problem of &quot;how do I explain this to my parents&#x2F;grandparents?&quot;

Dupe, already discussed twice in recent days, and this article doesn’t look to add anything substantial, though it is finally from the author’s own site rather than Twitter or GitHub.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32549604" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32549604</a> (8 days ago)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32617787" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32617787</a> (2 days ago)

Bert is well-known and respected in the DNS world and at this point follows his own drummer.